Clash Royale EsoPa Miner Poison Deck Guide

Clash Royale EsoPa Miner Poison Deck Guide by EsoPa1

Classified as a chip cycle control deck (in general weak to nothing, strong to nothing) High skill cap deck which means it is not recommended to newer players, as it requires a lot of prior knowledge -absolutely requires fundamental knowledge like counting elixir/tracking card cycle to pilot correctly Also not recommended on ladder (a lot of cards in the deck are weak if under leveled), this is a challenge/tourney capped deck

Cards:

Miner: Your win condition card. It’s strength is in it’s ability to be placed anywhere in the arena, and act as a mini tank for your units to focus the tower/opponent units

Electro Wizard: Your lynchpin defensive card. It attacks air and ground, is cheap, has an inbuilt zap that can deal with swarms and goblin barrel (if timed correctly). You want to typically use this card to setup counter attacks.

Knight: The all rounder semi-tank in your deck. Used mainly to deal with graveyard/miner and to help deal dps to tanks. It is your only real stagger card in the deck, so focus on using him to build pushes or defenses.

Skeleton: The better of the two 1 elixir cycle cards, especially now that we have 4 skeletons. Used to pull or deal dps, they are versatile in cycle decks.

Ice Spirit: Still a good cycle card, although not as popular as they used to be. Ice spirits can be used to reset important pushes and cycle your deck. Very important card in catching miners in close games.

Poison: This spell has gotten much better after the buff to it that SC gave to it. It now deals more damage to towers than fireball. Deals Damage over time + area denial and in combination with the miner, will root units long enough for the poison to clear opposing troops that would normally be used for a counter attack.

The Log: The best support spell in the game at the moment, there is no real replacement for this card as it offers too much utility against most decks (even vs Lavahound). Offers a clear to goblin barrels and finishing damage in combination with poison.

Inferno Tower: The best building in the game in my opinion. Solid at defending against tanks. Can be placed in many different positions depending on what kind of push is coming.

Notes to be successful with the deck

Mindset: Your mindset should be to cycle correctly through your cards, without giving up answers to your opponent’s deck. Since this deck prioritizes chip, it is difficult to come back from deficits so avoid falling behind as much as possible. You are playing a control deck, so answer for answer to your opponent, prevent them from creating their offence like they want to. If played correctly, your opponent should feel like they can’t do anything.

Counterattacking: Typically you’ll be deflecting pushes from your opponent as efficiently as possible, then counterattacking with your miner. You are looking to deal chip damage while at the same time take out an opponent’s counter push. Preferably your counter pushes should have Knight, Ewiz, Miner in the push. Poison is used if they over commit on defense (or when an important unit is placed e.g Ewiz/Musketeer/Minion Horde)

Cycling correctly: Cycling correctly is a hard aspect of the game to get down, as it doesn’t just include your own deck. Cycling correctly means to play your cards in an order that is beneficial to you while tracking your opponents deck. This is extremely important as one wrong move with this deck can mean the difference between loss and a win. For example, by poisoning a push vs Goblin gang you lose the ability to poison a horde or a pump

Against Pump Play: Pump has been seeing a resurgence in the scene with the rise of poison/3 musketeers/battleram. This usually means pumps are getting value even though they’ve become more risky to play. Miner Poison vs pump is a risky matchup, but if played correctly goes into the miner players favor. In the beginning of the game you want to keep pumps down (meaning before x2 elixir), while pressuring them with small attacks. You want to force them to choose to either save the pump or save the tower health. If they choose the pump you’ll deal damage to the tower earlier (meaning you’ll have the ability to ignore pumps in the late game), or if they choose the tower you stay even but have the advantage in card cycle to pressure as soon as they drop their next pump. This also depends on the positioning of the pump. Middle pumps you go for miner +poison on towers and for back collectors you’ll be going for pushes and miner poison, scenarios also include pushing down the lower tower with no pump there but poisoning the pump while you get damage on the lower tower

Proper skeleton usage: Most versatile card in your deck, both are going to be used for many different purposes. Main job for this card is to pull aggro from units, deal dps, stop lone ewizs, cycle your deck, catch miners (either in combination with ice spirit or not), deal with graveyards that have not used poison, and goblin barrels.

Ice Spirit: Important for catching opposing units, especially miners where you can ice spirit to automatically catch miners and then drop to reset their aggro away from tower. If you are going to push with ice spirit + miner, make sure to place ice spirit at the bridge first then miner to the tower. This is done because Ice spirits can tank 2 shots from a tower and live, saving your miner 2 shots from a tower + freezing the tower so that your miner can chip away. Ice spirits get one shot by Electro-Wizards, so do not drop onto them.

Miner Positioning: In general you want to miner in locations that are harder to guess (meaning inside of towers rather than outside of it) Depending on the kind of push you have will alter your miner placement, as in if you have a large counterattack you’ll sometimes want to send your miners to a likely location to snipe important units (like ewiz). If you want to prelog cards like goblin gang/skarmy you’ll want to miner to the lower side of the tower as logs do not go far/fast enough to take them out if you miner to the top of the tower. Vary your miner placement to avoid it being caught, since it is the difference between 0 damage and 300.

Vs. Tornado If you have reason to believe someone is running nado, you want to miner safely where tornado cannot bring your miner to tower (lower right/left side of the tower) The problem with this is that it makes your miners predictable. You’ll only be able to do this a few times, so you’ll have to miner after they force nado on their offence. Decks that use tornado will have a higher elixir avg than yours, so you’ll be able to outcycle it most of the time, avoid activating king tower (else you will have to win with risky miner placements and poison exclusively)

Electro Wizard placement: Depending on the matchup electro wiz is played in different locations. The gist is that you want to play him to stop opponent pushes while also keeping him alive for counterattacks. The opposite of this is playing him offensively to pressure an opponent trying to set up a push. (example: opponent plays baby dragon at the back, you play knight. As they collide in the middle you can play ewiz offensively to support your tank and go into a counter push).

Electro wiz vs Goblin barrel refer to Orange Juice’s “How to counter goblin barrel” video, timing is easy to get down once you get the feel for it (if you do it right this lets you log opposing pushes instead of keeping the log, you’ll take around 100 damage however)

You can log a defending electro wizard that is planted onto of yours, this forces your electro wizard to win the fight and live to push into tower

Vs. Battleram, DO NOT PLACE EWIZ ON TOP OF IT, play to the side and kite the barbs that pop out afterwards. This is done so that the E-Wiz can stay alive and won’t die to the emerging barbarians. Vs. A lone balloon, Ice spirit + Ewiz will take care of it without reaching the tower, without the IS balloon reaches tower Vs. Goblin Gang, drop directly on top

For Inferno Placements: Refer again to Orange Juice’s amazing video, “ The ultimate building placement guide” video where he goes into depth on where to place what buildings, and why.

Matchups: Rated out of 5 stars with 5 stars being the hardest and 1 Star being the easiest

Vs. Golem: 2 Stars Once you figure out this matchup, you should not lose. This matchup is dependant on your ability to pressure pumps and defend correctly. If you are pressuring when they pump and set up pushes right (knights to tank tower, ewiz behind and miner + optional poison) you will come out with damage lead while crippling the golem economy. At most the golem player will have one push where they can afford lightning, but it should not get through as long as you don’t give them lightning value with ewiz + inferno tower. Most infernos should be planted in 4-3, as their only ground unit to bypass the tower is ewiz, which you should be dropping a knight on. You’ll want to inferno in the standard position if you know the golem does not/cannot lightning, and want to bring units to the middle.

Vs. Miner Poison: 3 Stars Miner Poison mirrors are dependant on the player who first gets the chip damage onto a tower. For this reason you’ll be playing this deck in a far more aggressive fashion as compared to other decks. Guessing miners with Knight/Skeletons/Ice spirit sets apart miner players when playing mirrors as all damage is important. When you gain the lead in damage you’ll want to still play up, but focus on catching their miners to reduce damage to your tower. Holding Ice spirit in this matchup is important for this reason. If you are behind, your goal is to defend miner pushes and go into counterattacks where you can poison their defense and get the chip lead. Varying up miner placement is probably the most important in this matchup, since even 2 miner swings can put the matchup into your favor.

Vs. Graveyard ** Bowler Nado variation: 4.5 stars** *Credit to B-rad (best miner poison player in the world, recently finished 2nd in the world on ladder) for these guidelines to beating bowler nado graveyard Inferno Towers are key to this matchup, look for good value on them and make sure that their ewiz is out of cycle (you can bait it out with well timed miner attacks. Do not ever let a baby dragon near your tower, best to plant inferno’s in the lavahound position for this card. Save knights for graveyard, in the event that you do not have knight you place poison on your tower. You will take around 200 damage but better than your tower getting taken off of one push Avoid miner placements where they can tornado the miner to King tower. Chip them out before they chip you out, play aggressive especially in x2 elixir where you should be miner poisoning as often as possible

Vs. 3 Musketeers with Battleram: 5 Stars The single hardest matchup that I’ve come up against. I lose most times to it unless the opponent allows me a lot of damage on one of his towers early on (which shouldn’t happen). You want to play this matchup in the beginning similar to golem, where you’ll be focusing on tower damage while poisoning pumps. They will outcycle you on pumps, so the damage on towers is important here to close out the game. When they begin to play their 3 Musketeers you want to inferno toward the lower tower, and place your Electro-Wizard toward the lane with the two musketeers. Place knights onto the two musketeers and your other cycle cards onto the 1 musk push. If you have to miner here, miner as well. When x2 starts, you cannot poison pumps anymore and will have to defensive poison the 2 musks that are split, sometimes you’ll get lucky and they’ll split 2 on top of the lower tower (always take those poisons). Overall this matchup is the hardest and is prevalent in the meta atm, which is in my opinion one of the reasons Miner poison is not strong atm.

Vs. Log Bait: 2 Stars This matchup comes down to patience and if played well is completely in the hands of the miner poison player. Essentially you are defending until x2 and then sending miner poisons till their tower is down. Hold logs for goblin barrels (watch the shadow to see if they’re throwing it off center), Ewiz can be used to clear hordes (skarmy/goblin gang), Knight for princesses, and Inferno’s for hog riders if they have it. That’s not to say that this is the fixed way you have to defend everything, sometimes you’ll be forced to ewiz a barrel or poison a princess, just do not take damage to the point where they can spell-cycle you out. On using poison, poison for value in the early game. If they’re catching your miners with skarmy/gang/have a princess near then poison. Later you can send miner + poison indiscriminately.

Vs. Lavaloon: 4 Stars This matchup i’ve actually been having alot of success against after having played it enough. For beginners this matchup can feel downright unfair, with the lavahound player being able to take a tower in one push compared to the chip of miner. In reality, lavahound must amass a huge elixir bank to get off it’s push and you can abuse that. Playing aggressive and cycling fast is the key to beating lavaloon + good positioning with cards like E-wiz and ice spirit. Everytime they place lavaloon, you must go to the other lane with a strong push like knight/ewiz + Miner. If you can force out more than 3 Elixir, they cannot balloon and it’s an easy stop of their push with Inferno Tower. If done correctly, you’ll have their tower down to at least half on either side, and you can start going harder on offence when they drop their lavahound. Do not give value to their lightning.

Vs. Xbow: 3.5 out of 4 stars (Depending on how good the opposing player is) X-Bow is said to be a good matchup to Miner Poison, that might be the case for ladder play where the OT is 1 minute, but in tournament realm Miner Poison should always win. The trick to this matchup is setting up your units in the right place and mentality. You want to always have knight in cycle to tank for the X-bow, play E-wiz so that it can hit the X-bow (already one of the strongest combo’s to stop X-Bow attacks) and be sending miners to the X-bow. You can also log out the defending troops at the same time (damaging out X-bow as well in the process). As for your cycle cards like ice spirit and skeletons, you want to be splitting in the middle so as to avoid giving log value to the opponent and buying time for you to tank X-bow shots + help you cycle back to knights.

A good X-bow player will begin to switch lanes on you, and this is where mentality comes into play. You want to follow them and the more that they begin to put into their push the more you also put into your defense. This means logs + miners + poisons (as needed). If you are playing against a weak X-bow player, you’ll be able to defend with just knight + ewiz, and in that case send miners to the lower tower and just chip them out like normal.

Vs. Hog Cycle: 2Stars This is most akin to the log bait matchup, where you defend until x2 and then just relentlessly chip them out. The only thing is that this matchup is so much easier as the only threat you have to worry about is the hog. The hog can be full stopped by an inferno, or an E-wiz + ice spirit/skeleton combo ( Ewiz should be played at the bridge to do this properly). A big tell tale sign that they are about to push into you is when they cycle their cards into one lane, all you have to do is log it out it all out and place your defending units as they place theirs. Send Miner poisons and try to catch their squishy unit (musk, e-wiz) with poison. Keep changing your miner positioning so they can’t catch it. The only way you lose is if you overcommit and allow them to outcycle your defence and proceed to spell cycle you out, so make sure to keep up with them and abuse your powerspike at x2 elixir. Other than that enjoy the free win.

I hope you enjoyed and it helps to make you a better player, thank you for reading!